Brighton Rock (24 page)

‘It does happen,’ Dallow said. ‘It’s the luck of the game.’

‘I’ve read love stories,’ the Boy said. He had never been so vocal before, staring in at the paper plates with frilly edges and the two-valve receiving set: the daintiness and the grossness. ‘Frank’s wife reads them. You know the sort. Lady Angeline turned her starry eyes towards Sir Mark. They make me sick. Sicker than the other kind’—Dallow watched with astonishment this sudden horrified gift of tongues—‘the kind you buy under the counter. Spicer used to get them. About girls being beaten. Full of shame to expose herself thus before the boys she stooped. . . It’s all the same thing,’ he said, turning his poisoned eyes away from the window, from point to point of the long shabby street: a smell of fish, the sawdusted pavement below the carcasses. ‘It’s fun. It’s the game.’

‘The world’s got to go on,’ Dallow said uneasily.

‘Why?’

‘You don’t need to ask me,’ Dallow said. ‘You know best. You’re a Roman aren’t you? You believe. . . ’

‘Credo in unum Satanum,’ the Boy said.

‘I don’t know Latin. I only know. . . ’

‘Come on,’ the Boy said. ‘Let’s have it. Dallow’s creed.’

‘The world’s all right if you don’t go too far.’

‘Is that all?’

‘It’s time for you to be at the registrar’s. Hear the clock? It’s striking two now.’ A peal of bells stopped their cracked chime and struck—one, two—

The Boy’s whole face loosened again: he put his hand on Dallow’s arm. ‘You’re a good sort, Dallow. You know a lot. Tell me—’ his hand fell away. He looked beyond Dallow down the street. He said hopelessly, ‘Here she is. What’s she doing in
this
street?’

‘She’s not hurrying either,’ Dallow commented, watching the thin figure slowly approach. At that distance she didn’t even look her age. He said, ‘It was clever of Prewitt to get the licence at all considering.’

‘Parents’ consent,’ the Boy said dully. ‘Best for morality.’ He watched the girl as if she were a stranger he had got to meet. ‘And then you see there was a stroke of luck. I wasn’t registered. Not anywhere they could find. They added a year or two. No parents. No guardian. It was a touching story old Prewitt spun.’

She had tricked herself up for the wedding, discarded the hat he hadn’t liked: a new mackintosh, a touch of powder and cheap lipstick. She looked like one of the small gaudy statues in an ugly church: a paper crown wouldn’t have looked odd on her or a painted heart: you could pray to her but you couldn’t expect an answer.

‘Where’ve you been?’ the Boy said. ‘Don’t you know you’re late?’

They didn’t even touch hands. An awful formality fell between them.

‘I’m sorry, Pinkie. You see’—she brought the fact out with shame, as if she were admitting conversation with his enemy—‘I went to the church.’

‘What for?’ he said.

‘I don’t know, Pinkie. I got confused. I thought I’d go to confession.’

He grinned at her. ‘Confession? That’s rich.’

‘You see I wanted—I thought—’

‘For Christ’s sake what?’

‘I wanted to be in a state of grace when I married you.’ She took no notice at all of Dallow. The theological term lay oddly and pedantically on her tongue. They were two Romans together in the grey street. They understood each other. She used terms common to heaven and hell.

‘And did you?’ the Boy said.

‘No. I went and rang the bell and asked for Father James. But then I remembered. It wasn’t any good confessing. I went away,’ she said with a mixture of fear and pride. ‘We’re going to do a mortal sin.’

The Boy said, with bitter and unhappy relish, ‘It’ll be no good going to confession ever again—as long as we’re both alive.’ He had graduated in pain: first the school dividers had been left behind, next the razor. He had a sense now that the murders of Hale and Spicer were trivial acts, a boy’s game, and he had put away childish things. Murder had only led up to this—this corruption. He was filled with awe at his own powers. ‘We’d better be moving,’ he said and touched her arm with next to tenderness. As once before he had a sense of needing her.

Mr Prewitt greeted them with official mirth. All his jokes seemed to be spoken in court, with an ulterior motive, to catch a magistrate’s ear. In the great institutional hall from which the corridors led off to deaths and births there was a smell of disinfectant. The walls were tiled like a public lavatory. Somebody had dropped a rose. Mr Prewitt quoted promptly, inaccurately, ‘Roses, roses all the way, and never a sprig of yew.’ A soft hollow hand guided the Boy by the elbow: ‘No, no, not that way. That’s taxes. That comes later.’ He led them up great stone stairs. A clerk passed them carrying printed forms. ‘And what is the little lady thinking?’ Mr Prewitt said. She didn’t answer him.

Only the bride and groom were allowed to mount the sanctuary steps, to kneel down within the sanctuary rails with the priest and the Host.

‘Parents coming?’ Mr Prewitt asked. She shook heir head. ‘The great thing is,’ Mr Prewitt said, ‘it’s over quickly. Just sign the names along the dotted line. Sit down here. We’ve got to wait our turn, you know.’

They sat down. A mop leant in a corner against the tiled wall. The footsteps of a clerk squealed on the icy paving down another passage. Presently a big brown door opened: they saw a row of clerks inside who didn’t look up: a man and wife came out into the corridor. A woman followed them and took the mop. The man—he was middle-aged—said ‘thank you’, gave her sixpence. He said, ‘We’ll catch the three-fifteen after all.’ On the woman’s face there was a look of faint astonishment, bewilderment, nothing so definite as disappointment. She wore a brown straw and carried an attaché case. She was middle-aged too. She might have been thinking, ‘Is that all there is to it—after all these years?’ They went down the big stairs walking a little apart, like strangers in a store.

‘Our turn,’ Mr Prewitt said, rising briskly. He led the way through the room where the clerks worked. Nobody bothered to look up. Nibs wrote smooth numerals and ran on. In a small inner room with green washed walls like a clinic’s the registrar waited: a table, three or four chairs against the wall. It wasn’t what she thought a marriage would be like—for a moment she was daunted by the cold poverty of a state-made ceremony.

‘Good morning,’ the registrar said. ‘If the witnesses will just sit down—would you two’—he beckoned them to the table and stared at them with gold-rimmed and glassy importance: it was as if he considered himself on the fringe of the priestly office. The Boy’s heart beat: he was sickened by the reality of the moment. He wore a look of sullenness and of stupidity.

‘You’re both very young,’ the registrar said.

‘It’s fixed,’ the Boy said. ‘You don’t have to talk about it. It’s fixed.’

The registrar gave him a glance of intense dislike; he said, ‘Repeat after me,’ and then ran too quickly on, ‘I do solemnly declare that I know not of any lawful impediment,’ so that the Boy couldn’t follow him. The registrar said sharply, ‘It’s quite simple. You’ve only to repeat after me. . . ’

‘Go slower,’ the Boy said. He wanted to lay his hand on speed and brake it down, but it ran on: it was no time at all, a matter of seconds, before he was repeating the formula ‘my lawful wedded wife.’ He tried to make it careless, he kept his eyes off Rose, but the words were weighted with shame.

‘No ring?’ the registrar asked sharply.

‘We don’t need any ring,’ the Boy said. ‘This isn’t a church,’ feeling he could never now rid his memory of the cold green room and the glassy face. He heard Rose repeating by his side: ‘I call upon these persons here present to witness. . . ’ and then the word ‘husband’, and he looked sharply up at her. If there had been any complacency in her face then he would have struck it. But there was only surprise as if she were reading a book and had come to the last page too soon.

The registrar said, ‘You sign here. The charge is seven and sixpence.’ He wore an air of official unconcern while Mr Prewitt fumbled.

‘These persons,’ the Boy said and laughed brokenly. ‘That’s you, Prewitt and Dallow.’ He took the pen and the Government nib scratched into the page, gathering fur; in the old days, it occurred to him, you signed covenants like this in your blood. He stood back and watched Rose awkwardly sign—his temporal safety in return for two immortalities of pain. He had no doubt whatever that this was mortal sin, and he was filled with a kind of
gloomy
hilarity and pride. He saw himself now as a full grown man for whom the angels wept.

‘These persons,’ he repeated, ignoring the registrar altogether. ‘Come and have a drink.’

‘Well,’ Mr Prewitt said, ‘that’s a surprise from you.’

‘Oh, Dallow will tell you,’ the Boy said. ‘I’m a drinking man these days.’ He looked across at Rose. ‘There’s nothing I’m not now,’ he said. He took her by the elbow and led the way out to the tiled passage and the big stairs: the mop was gone and somebody had picked up the flower. A couple rose as they came out: the market was firm. He said, ‘That was a wedding. Can you beat it? We’re’—he meant to say ‘husband and wife’, but his mind flinched from the defining phrase. ‘We got to celebrate,’ he said, and like an old relation you can always trust for the tactless word his brain beat on—‘celebrate what?’ and he thought of the girl sprawling in the Lancia and the long night coming down.

They went to the pub round the corner. It was nearly closing time, and he stood them pints of bitter and Rose took a port. She hadn’t spoken since the registrar had given her the words to say. Mr Prewitt took a quick look round and parked his portfolio. With his dark striped trousers he might really have been at a wedding. ‘Here’s to the bride,’ he said with a jocularity which petered unobtrusively out. It was as if he had tried to crack a joke with a magistrate and scented a rebuff: the old face recomposed itself quickly on serious lines. He said reverently, ‘To your happiness, my dear.’

She didn’t answer; she was looking at her own face in a glass marked Extra Stout: in the new setting with a foreground of beer handles, it was a strange face. It seemed to carry an enormous weight of responsibility.

‘A penny for your thoughts,’ Dallow said to her. The Boy put the glass of bitter to his mouth and tasted for the second time—the nausea of other people’s pleasures stuck in his throat. He watched her sourly as she gazed wordlessly back at his companions; and again he was sensible of how she completed him.
He
knew her thoughts: they beat unregarded in his own nerves. He said with triumphant venom, ‘I can tell you what she’s thinking
of.
Not much of a wedding, she’s thinking. She’s thinking—it’s not what I pictured. That’s right, isn’t it?’

She nodded, holding the glass of port as if she hadn’t learned the way to drink.

‘With my body I thee worship,’ he began to quote at her, ‘with all my worldly goods. . . and then,’ he said, turning to Prewitt, ‘I give her a gold piece.’

‘Time, gentlemen,’ the barman said, swilling not quite empty glasses into the lead trough, mopping with a yeasty cloth.

‘We’re up in the sanctuary, do you see, with the priest. . . ’

‘Drink up, gentlemen.’

Mr Prewitt said uneasily, ‘One wedding’s as good as another in the eyes of the law.’ He nodded encouragingly at the girl who watched them all with famished immature eyes. ‘You’re married all right. Trust me.’

‘Married?’ the Boy said. ‘Do you call that married?’ He screwed up the beery spittle on his tongue.

‘Easy on,’ Dallow said. ‘Give the girl a chance. You don’t need to go too far.’

‘Come along, gentlemen, empty your glasses.’

‘Married!’ the Boy repeated. ‘Ask her.’ The two men drank up in a shocked furtive way and Mr Prewitt said, ‘Well, I’ll be getting on.’ The Boy regarded them with contempt; they didn’t understand a thing, and again he was touched by the sense of communion between himself and Rose—she too knew that this evening meant nothing at all, that there hadn’t been a wedding. He said with rough kindness, ‘Come on. We’ll be going,’ and raised a hand to put it on her arm—then saw the double image in the mirror (Extra Stout) and let it fall: a married couple the image winked at him.

‘Where?’ Rose asked.

Where? he hadn’t thought of that—you had to take them somewhere—the honeymoon, the weekend at the sea, the present from Margate on the mantelpiece his mother’d had; from one sea to another, a change of pier.

‘I’ll be seeing you,’ Dallow said. He paused a moment at the door, met the Boy’s eye, the question, the appeal, understood
nothing,
and sloped away cheerily waving after Mr Prewitt, leaving them alone.

It was as if they’d never been alone before in spite of the barman drying the glasses: not really alone in the room at Snow’s, nor above the sea at Peacehaven—not alone as they were now.

‘We’d better be off,’ Rose said.

They stood on the pavement and heard the door of the ‘Crown’ closed and locked behind them—a bolt grind into place; they felt as if they were shut out from an Eden of ignorance. On this side there was nothing to look forward to but experience.

‘Are we going to Frank’s?’ the girl asked. It was one of those moments of sudden silence that falls on the busiest afternoon: not a tram bell, not a cry of steam from the terminus: a flock of birds shot up together into the air above Old Steyne and hovered there as if a crime had been committed on the ground. He thought with nostalgia of the room at Frank’s—he knew exactly where to put his hand for money in the soap-dish; everything was familiar; nothing strange there; it shared his bitter virginity.

‘No,’ he said and again, as noise came back, the clang and crash of afternoon, ‘No.’

‘Where?’

He smiled with hopeless malice—where did you bring a swell blonde to if not to the Cosmopolitan, coming down by Pullman at the weekend, driving over the downs in a scarlet roadster? Expensive scent and furs, sailing like a new-painted pinnace into the restaurant, something to swank about in return for the nocturnal act. He absorbed Rose’s shabbiness like a penance in a long look. ‘We’ll take a suite,’ he said, ‘at the Cosmopolitan.’

‘No, but where—really?’

‘You heard me—the Cosmopolitan.’ He flared up. ‘Don’t you think I’m good enough?’