Brighton Rock (13 page)

‘They got to serve me,’ the Boy said. ‘Who do they think they are?’

‘There isn’t a table.’

Everyone was watching them now—with disapproval.

‘Come outside, Pinkie.’

‘What are you all dressed up for?’

‘It’s my afternoon off. Come outside.’

He followed her out and suddenly taking her wrist he brought the poison on to his lips. ‘I could break your arm.’

‘What have I done, Pinkie?’

‘No table. They don’t like serving me in there, I’m no class. They’ll see—one day—’

‘What?’

But his mind staggered before the extent of his ambitions. He said, ‘Never mind—they’ll learn—’

‘Did you get the message, Pinkie?’

‘What message?’

‘I phoned you at Frank’s. I told him to tell you.’

‘Told who?’

‘I don’t know.’ She added casually, ‘I think it was the man who left the ticket.’

He gripped her wrist again. He said, ‘The man who left the ticket’s dead. You read it all.’ But she showed no sign of fear this time. He’d been too friendly. She ignored his reminder.

‘Did he find you?’ she asked, and he thought to himself: she’s got to be scared again.

‘No one found me,’ he said. He pushed her roughly forward. ‘Come on. We’ll walk. I’ll take you out.’

‘I was going home.’

‘You won’t go home. You’ll come with me. I want exercise,’ he said, looking down at his pointed shoes which had never walked further than the length of the parade.

‘Where’ll we go, Pinkie?’

‘Somewhere,’ Pinkie said, ‘out in the country. That’s where you go on a day like this.’ He tried to think for a moment of where the country was: the racecourse, that was country; and then a bus came by marked Peacehaven, and he waved his hand to it. ‘There you are,’ he said, ‘that’s country. We can talk there. There’s things we got to get straight.’

‘I thought we were going to walk.’

‘This is walking,’ he said roughly, pushing her up the steps. ‘You’re green. You don’t know a thing. You don’t think people really
walk
. Why—it’s miles.’

‘When people say, “Come for a walk,” they mean a bus?’

‘Or a car. I’d have taken you in the car, but the mob are out in it.’

‘You got a car?’

‘I couldn’t get on without a car,’ the Boy said, as the bus
climbed
up behind Rottingdean: red-brick buildings behind a wall, a great stretch of parkland, one girl with a hockey-stick staring at something in the sky, with cropped expensive turf all round her. The poison drained back into its proper glands: he was admired, no one insulted him, but when he looked at the girl who admired him, the poison oozed out again. He said, ‘Take off that hat. You look awful.’ She obeyed him: her mousy hair lay flat on the small scalp: he watched her with distaste. That was what they’d joked about him marrying: that. He watched her with his soured virginity, as one might watch a draught of medicine offered that one would never, never take; one would die first—or let others die. The chalky dust blew up round the windows.

‘You told me to ring up,’ Rose said, ‘so when. . . ’

‘Not here,’ the Boy said. ‘Wait till we’re alone.’ The driver’s head rose slowly against a waste of sky: a few white feathers blown backward into the blue: they were on top of the downs and turned eastwards. The Boy sat with his pointed shoes side by side, his hands in his pockets, feeling the throb of the engine come up through the thin soles.

‘It’s lovely,’ Rose said, ‘being out here—in the country with you.’ Little tarred bungalows with tin roofs paraded backwards, gardens scratched in the chalk, dry flower-beds like Saxon emblems carved on the downs. Notices read: ‘Pull in Here’, ‘Mazawattee tea’, ‘Genuine Antiques’, and hundreds of feet below the pale green sea washed into the scarred and shabby side of England. Peacehaven itself dwindled out against the downs: half-made streets turned into grass tracks. They walked down between the bungalows to the cliff-edge. There was nobody about: one of the bungalows had broken windows, in another the blinds were down for a death. ‘It makes me giddy,’ Rose said, ‘looking down.’ It was early closing and the store was shut; closing time and no drinks obtainable at the hotel; a vista of To Let boards running back along the chalky ruts of unfinished roads. The Boy could see over her shoulder the rough drop to the shingle. ‘It makes me feel I’ll fall,’ Rose said, turning from the sea. He let her turn; no need to act prematurely; the draught might never be offered.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘now—who rang up who and why?’

‘I rang up
you
, but you weren’t in.
He
answered.’

‘He?’ the Boy repeated.

‘The one who left the ticket that day you came in. You remember—you were looking for something.’ He remembered all right—the hand under the cloth, the stupid innocent face he had expected would so easily forget. ‘You remember a lot,’ he said, frowning at the thought.

‘I wouldn’t forget that day,’ she said abruptly and stopped.

‘You forget a lot, too. I just told you that wasn’t the man you heard speak. That man’s dead.’

‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ she said. ‘What matters is—someone was in asking questions.’

‘About the ticket?’

‘Yes.’

‘A man?’

‘A woman. A big one with a laugh. You should have heard the laugh. Just as if she’d never had a care. I didn’t trust her. She wasn’t our kind.’

‘Our kind’: he frowned again towards the shallow wrinkled tide at the suggestion that they had something in common and spoke sharply. ‘What did she want?’

‘She wanted to know everything. What the man who left the card looked like.’

‘What did you tell her?’

‘I didn’t tell her a thing, Pinkie.’

The Boy dug with his pointed shoe into the thin dry turf and sent an empty corned-beef tin rattling down the ruts. ‘It’s only you I’m thinking of,’ he said. ‘It don’t matter to me. I’m not concerned. But I wouldn’t want you getting mixed up in things that might be dangerous.’ He looked quickly up at her, sideways. ‘You don’t seem scared. It’s serious what I’m telling you.’

‘I wouldn’t be scared, Pinkie—not with you about.’

He dug his nails into his hands with vexation. She remembered everything she ought to forget, and forgot all that she should remember—the vitriol bottle. He’d scared her all right then: he’d been too friendly since: she really believed that he was fond of her. Why, this, he supposed, was ‘walking out’, and he thought again of Spicer’s joke. He looked at the mousy skull, the bony body and the shabby dress, and shuddered—involuntarily, a goose flying
across
the final bed. ‘Saturday,’ he thought, ‘today’s Saturday,’ remembering the room at home, the frightening weekly exercise of his parents which he watched from his single bed. That was what they expected of you, every polony you met had her eye on the bed: his virginity straightened in him like sex. That was how they judged you: not by whether you had the guts to kill a man, to run a mob, to conquer Colleoni. He said, ‘We don’t want to stay round here. We’ll be getting back.’

‘We’ve only just come,’ the girl said. ‘Let’s stay a bit, Pinkie. I like the country,’ she said.

‘You’ve had a look,’ he said. ‘You can’t
do
anything with the country. The pub’s closed.’

‘We could just sit. We’ve got to wait for the bus anyway. You’re funny. You aren’t scared of anything, are you?’

He laughed queerly, sitting awkwardly down in front of the bungalow with the shattered glass. ‘Me scared? That’s funny.’ He lay back against the bank, his waistcoat undone, his thin frayed tie bright and striped against the chalk.

‘This is better than going home,’ Rose said.

‘Where’s home?’

‘Nelson Place. Do you know it?’

‘Oh, I’ve passed through,’ he said airily, but he could have drawn its plan as accurately as a surveyor on the turf: the barred and battlemented Salvation Army gaff at the corner: his own home beyond in Paradise Piece: the houses which looked as if they had passed through an intensive bombardment, flapping gutters and glassless windows, an iron bedstead rusting in a front garden, the smashed and wasted ground in front where houses had been pulled down for model flats which had never gone up.

They lay on the chalk bank side by side with a common geography, and a little hate mixed with his contempt. He thought he had made his escape, and here his home was: back beside him, making claims.

Rose said suddenly, ‘
She’s
never lived there.’

‘Who?’

‘That woman asking questions. Never a care.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘we can’t all ’ave been born in Nelson Place.’

‘You weren’t born there—or somewhere round?’

‘Me. Of course not. What do you think?’

‘I thought—maybe you were. You’re a Roman too. We were all Romans in Nelson Place. You believe in things. Like Hell. But you can see she don’t believe a thing.’ She said bitterly, ‘You can tell the world’s all dandy with her.’

He defended himself from any connection with Paradise Piece: ‘I don’t take any stock in religion. Hell—it’s just there. You don’t need to think of it—not before you die.’

‘You might die sudden.’

He closed his eyes under the bright empty arch, and a memory floated up imperfectly into speech. ‘You know what they say—“Between the stirrup and the ground, he something sought and something found”.’

‘Mercy.’

‘That’s right: Mercy.’

‘It would be awful, though,’ she said slowly, ‘if they didn’t give you time.’ She turned her cheek on to the chalk towards him and added, as if he could help her, ‘That’s what I always pray. That I won’t die sudden. What do you pray?’

‘I don’t,’ he said, but he was praying even while he spoke to someone or something: that he wouldn’t need to carry on any further with her, get mixed up again with that drab dynamited plot of ground they both called home.

‘You angry about anything?’ Rose asked.

‘A man wants to be quiet sometimes,’ he said, lying rigidly against the chalk bank, giving nothing away. In the silence a shutter flapped, and the tide lisped: two people walking out: that’s what they were, and the memory of Colleoni’s luxury, the crowned chairs at the Cosmopolitan, came back to taunt him. He said, ‘Talk, can’t you? Say something.’

‘You wanted to be quiet,’ she retorted with a sudden anger which took him by surprise. He hadn’t thought her capable of that. ‘If I don’t suit you,’ she said, ‘you can leave me alone. I didn’t ask to come out.’ She sat with her hands round her knees and her cheeks burned on the tip of the bone: anger was as good as rouge on her thin face. ‘If I’m not grand enough—your car and all—’

‘Who said—’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m not that dumb. I’ve seen you looking at me. My hat—’

It occurred to him suddenly that she might even get up and leave him, go back to Snow’s with her secret for the first comer who questioned her kindly: he had to conciliate her, they were walking out, he’d got to do the things expected of him. He put out his hand with repulsion; it lay like a cold paddock on her knee. ‘You took me wrong,’ he said, ‘you’re a sweet girl. I’ve been worried, that’s all. Business worries. You and me’—he swallowed painfully—‘we suit each other down to the ground.’ He saw the colour go, the face turn to him with a blind willingness to be deceived, saw the lips waiting. He drew her hand up quickly and put his mouth against her fingers: anything was better than the lips: the fingers were rough on his skin and tasted a little of soap. She said, ‘Pinkie, I’m sorry. You’re sweet to me.’

He laughed nervously, ‘You and me,’ and heard the hoot of a bus with the joy of a besieged man listening to the bugles of the relieving force. ‘There,’ he said, ‘the bus. Let’s be going. I’m not much of a one for the country. A city bird. You too.’ She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape—anywhere—for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.

‘It’s beautiful here all the same,’ she said, staring up the chalky ruts between the To Let boards, and the Boy laughed again at the fine words people gave to a dirty act: love, beauty. . . All his pride coiled like a watch spring round the thought that
he
wasn’t deceived, that
he
wasn’t going to give himself up to marriage and the birth of children, he was going to be where Colleoni now was and higher. . . He knew everything, he had watched every detail of the act of sex, you couldn’t deceive him with lovely words, there was nothing to be excited about, no gain to recompense you for what you lost; but when Rose turned to him again, with the expectation of a kiss, he was aware all the same of a horrifying ignorance. His mouth missed hers and recoiled. He’d never yet kissed a girl.

She said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m stupid. I’ve never had—’ and suddenly broke off to watch a gull rise from one of the little parched gardens and drop over the cliff towards the sea.

He didn’t speak to her in the bus, sullen and ill-at-ease, sitting with his hands in his pockets, his feet close together, not knowing why he’d come this far out with her, only to go back again with nothing settled, the secret, the memory still lodged securely in her skull. The country unwound the other way: Mazawattee tea, antique dealers, pull-ins, the thin grass petering out on the first asphalt.

From the pier the Brighton anglers flung their floats. A little music ground mournfully out into the windy sunlight. They walked on the sunny side past ‘A Night of Love’, ‘For Men Only’, ‘The Fan Dancer’. Rose asked, ‘Is business bad?’

‘There’s always worries,’ the Boy said.

‘I wish I could help, be of use.’ He said nothing, walking on. She put out a hand towards the thin rigid figure, seeing the smooth cheek, the fluff of fair hair at the nape. ‘You’re so young, Pinkie, to get worries.’ She put her hand through his arm. ‘We’re both young, Pinkie,’ and felt his body stonily withdrawn.

A photographer said, ‘Snap you together against the sea,’ raising the cap from his camera, and the Boy flung up his hands before his face and went on.

‘Don’t you like being snapped, Pinkie? We might have had our pictures stuck up for people to see. It wouldn’t have
cost
anything.’