Authors: Graham Greene
‘She’ll find somebody.’
‘Would you, Delia?’ The pasty girl leant her head close to her friend’s and they consulted together: every now and then Delia squealed.
‘That’s all right then,’ Hale said, ‘you’ll come?’
‘Couldn’t you find a friend?’
‘I don’t know anyone here,’ Hale said. ‘Come along. I’ll take you anywhere for lunch. All I want—’ he grinned miserably—‘is for you to stick close.’
‘No,’ the fat girl said. ‘I couldn’t possibly—not without my friend.’
‘Well, both of you come along then,’ Hale said.
‘It wouldn’t be much fun for Delia,’ the fat girl said.
A boy’s voice interrupted them. ‘So there you are, Fred,’ and Hale looked up at the grey inhuman seventeen-year-old eyes.
‘Why,’ the fat girl squealed, ‘he said he hadn’t got a friend.’
‘You can’t believe what Fred says,’ the voice said.
‘Now we can make a proper party,’ the fat girl said. ‘This is my friend Delia. I’m Molly.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ the boy said. ‘Where are we going, Fred?’
‘I’m hungry,’ the fat girl said. ‘I bet you’re hungry too, Delia?’ and Delia wriggled and squealed.
‘I know a good place,’ the boy said.
‘Do they have sundaes?’
‘The best sundaes,’ he reassured her in his serious dead voice.
‘That’s what I want, a sundae. Delia likes splits best.’
‘We’ll be going, Fred,’ the boy said.
Hale rose. His hands were shaking. This was real now: the boy, the razor cut, life going out with the blood in pain: not the deck chairs and the permanent waves, the miniature cars tearing round the curve on the Palace Pier. The ground moved under his feet, and only the thought of where they might take him while he was unconscious saved him from fainting. But even then common pride, the instinct not to make a scene, remained overpoweringly strong; embarrassment had more force than terror, it prevented him crying his fear aloud, it even urged him to go quietly. If the boy had not spoken again he might have gone.
‘We’d better get moving, Fred,’ the boy said.
‘No,’ Hale said. ‘I’m not coming. I don’t know him. My name’s not Fred. I’ve never seen him before. He’s just getting fresh,’ and he walked rapidly away, with his head down, hopeless now—there wasn’t time—only anxious to keep moving, to keep out in the clear sun; until from far down the front he heard a woman’s winey voice singing, singing of brides and bouquets, of lilies and mourning shrouds, a Victorian ballad, and he moved towards it like someone who has been lost a long while in a desert makes for the glow of a fire.
‘Why,’ she said, ‘if it isn’t lonely heart,’ and to his astonishment she was all by herself in a wilderness of chairs. ‘They’ve gone to the gents,’ she said.
‘Can I sit down?’ Hale asked. His voice broke with relief.
‘If you’ve got twopence,’ she said. ‘I haven’t.’ She began to laugh, the great breasts pushing at her dress. ‘Someone pinched
my
bag,’ she said. ‘Every penny I’ve got.’ He watched her with astonishment. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’s not the funny part. It’s the letters. He’ll have had all Tom’s letters to read. Were they passionate? Tom’ll be crazy when he hears.’
‘You’ll be wanting some money,’ Hale said.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m not worrying. Some nice feller will lend me ten bob—when they come out of the gents.’
‘They your friends?’ Hale asked.
‘I met ’em in the pub,’ she said.
‘You think,’ Hale said, ‘they’ll come back from the gents?’
‘My,’ she said, ‘you don’t think—’ She gazed up the parade, then looked at Hale and began to laugh again. ‘You win,’ she said. ‘They’ve pulled my leg properly. But there was only ten bob—and Tom’s letters.’
‘Will you have lunch with me now?’ Hale said.
‘I had a snack in the pub,’ she said. ‘They treated me to that, so I got something out of my ten bob.’
‘Have a little more.’
‘No, I don’t fancy any more,’ she said, and leaning far back in the deck-chair with her skirt pulled up to her knees exposing her fine legs, with an air of ribald luxury, she added, ‘What a day,’ sparkling back at the bright sea. ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘they’ll wish they’d never been born. I’m a sticker where right’s concerned.’
‘Your name’s Lily?’ Hale asked. He couldn’t see the boy any more: he’d gone: Cubitt had gone. There was nobody he could recognize as far as he could see.
‘That’s what
they
called me,’ she said. ‘My real name’s Ida.’ The old and vulgarized Grecian name recovered a little dignity. She said, ‘You look poorly. You ought to go off and eat somewhere.’
‘Not if you won’t come,’ Hale said. ‘I only want to stay here with you.’
‘Why, that’s a nice speech,’ she said. ‘I wish Tom could hear you—he writes passionate, but when it comes to talking—’
‘Does he want to marry you?’ Hale asked. She smelt of soap and wine: comfort and peace and a slow sleepy physical enjoyment, a touch of the nursery and the mother, stole from the big tipsy mouth, the magnificent breasts and legs, and reached Hale’s withered and frightened and bitter little brain.
‘He
was
married to me once,’ Ida said. ‘But he didn’t know when he was lucky. Now he wants to come back. You should see his letters. I’d show them to you if they hadn’t been stolen. He ought to be ashamed,’ she said, laughing with pleasure, ‘writing such things. You’d never think. And he was such a quiet fellow too. Well, I always say it’s fun to be alive.’
‘Will you take him back?’ Hale asked, peering out from the valley of the shadow with sourness and envy.
‘I should think not,’ Ida said. ‘I know all about him. There’d be no thrill. If I wanted a man I could do better than that now.’ She wasn’t boastful: only a little drunk and happy. ‘I could marry money if I chose.’
‘And how do you live now?’ Hale said.
‘From hand to mouth,’ she said and winked at him and made the motion of tipping a glass. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Fred.’ He said it automatically: it was the name he always gave to chance acquaintances. From some obscure motive of secrecy he shielded his own name, Charles. From childhood he had loved secrecy, a hiding place, the dark, but it was in the dark he had met Kite, the boy, Cubitt, the whole mob.
‘And how do you live?’ she asked cheerfully. Men always liked to tell, and she liked to hear. She had an immense store of masculine experiences.
‘Betting,’ he said promptly, putting up his barrier of evasion.
‘I like a flutter myself. Could you give me a tip, I wonder, for Brighton on Saturday?’
‘Black Boy,’ Hale said, ‘in the four o’clock.’
‘He’s twenty to one.’
Hale looked at her with respect. ‘Take it or leave it.’
‘Oh, I’ll take it,’ Ida said. ‘I always take a tip.’
‘Whoever gives it you?’
‘That’s my system. Will you be there?’
‘No,’ Hale said. ‘I can’t make it.’ He put his hand on her wrist. He wasn’t going to run any more risks. He’d tell the news-editor he was taken ill: he’d resign: he’d do anything. Life was here beside him, he wasn’t going to play around with death. ‘Come to the station with me,’ he said. ‘Come back to town with me.’
“On a day like this,’ Ida said. ‘Not me. You’ve had too much
town.
You look stuffed up. A blow along the front’ll do you good. Besides, there’s lots of things I want to see. I want to see the Aquarium and Black Rock and I haven’t been on the Palace Pier yet today. There’s always something new on the Palace Pier. I’m out for a bit of fun.’
‘We’ll do those and then—’
‘When I make a day of it,’ Ida said, ‘I like to make a real day of it. I told you—I’m a sticker.’
‘I don’t mind,’ Hale said, ‘if you’ll stay with me.’
‘Well,
you
can’t steal my bag,’ Ida said. ‘But I warn you—I like to spend. I’m not satisfied with a ring here and a shot there: I want all the shows.’
‘It’s a long walk,’ Hale said, ‘to the Palace Pier in this sun. We’d better take a taxi.’ But he made no immediate pass at Ida in the taxi, sitting there bonily crouched with his eyes on the parade: no sign of the boy or Cubitt in the bright broad day sweeping by. He turned reluctantly back, and, with the sense of her great open friendly breasts, fastened his mouth on hers and received the taste of port wine on his tongue and saw in the driver’s mirror the old 1925 Morris following behind, with its split and flapping hood, its bent fender and cracked and discoloured windscreen. He watched it with his mouth on hers, shaking against her as the taxi ground slowly along beside the parade.
‘Give me breath,’ she said at last, pushing him off and straightening her hat. ‘You believe in hard work,’ she said. ‘It’s you little fellows—’ she could feel his nerves jumping under her hand, and she shouted quickly through the tube at the driver, ‘Don’t stop. Go on back and round again.’ He was like a man with fever.
‘You’re sick,’ she said. ‘You oughtn’t to be alone. What’s the matter with you?’
He couldn’t keep it in. ‘I’m going to die. I’m scared.’
‘Have you seen a doctor?’
‘They are no good. They can’t do anything.’
‘You oughtn’t to be out alone,’ Ida said. ‘Did they tell you that—the doctors, I mean?’
‘Yes,’ he said and put his mouth on hers again because when he kissed her he could watch in the mirror the old Morris vibrating after them down the parade.
She pushed him off but kept her arms round him. ‘They’re crazy. You aren’t that sick. You can’t tell me I wouldn’t know if you were that sick,’ she said. ‘I don’t like to see a fellow throw up the sponge that way. It’s a good world if you don’t weaken.’
‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘long as you are here.’
‘That’s better,’ she said, ‘be yourself,’ and letting down the window with a rush for the air to come in, she pushed her arm through his and said in a frightened gentle way, ‘You were just kidding, weren’t you, when you said that about the doctors? It wasn’t true, was it?’
‘No,’ Hale said wearily, ‘it wasn’t true.’
‘That’s a boy,’ Ida said. ‘You nearly had me scared for a moment. Nice thing it would have been for me if you’d passed out in this taxi. Something for Tom to read about in the paper, I’d say. But men are funny with me that way. Always trying to make out there’s something wrong, money or the wife or the heart. You aren’t the first who said he was dying. Never anything infectious though. Want to make the most of their last hours and all the rest of it. It comes of me being so big, I suppose. They think I’ll mother them. I’m not saying I didn’t fall for it the first time. “The doctors only give me a month,” he said to me—that was five years ago. I see him regular now in Henekey’s. “Hullo, you old ghost,” I always say to him, and he stands me oysters and a Guinness.’
‘No, I’m not sick,’ Hale said. ‘You needn’t be scared.’ He wasn’t going to let his pride down as much as that again, even in return for the peaceful and natural embrace. The Grand went by, the old statesman dozing out the day, the Metropole. ‘Here we are,’ Hale said. ‘You’ll stay with me, won’t you, even if I’m not sick.’
‘Of course I will,’ Ida said, hiccuping gently as she stepped out. ‘I like you, Fred. I liked you the moment I saw you. You’re a good sport, Fred. What’s that crowd, there?’ she asked with joyful curiosity, pointing to the gathering of neat and natty trousers, of bright blouses and bare arms and bleached and perfumed hair.
‘With every watch I sell,’ a man was shouting in the middle of it all, ‘I give a free gift worth twenty times the value of the watch. Only a shilling, ladies and gents, only a shilling. With every watch I sell. . . ’
‘Get me a watch, Fred,’ Ida said, pushing him gently, ‘and give
me
threepence before you go. I want to get a wash.’ They stood on the pavement at the entrance to the Palace Pier; the crowd was thick around them, passing in and out of the turnstiles, watching the pedlar: there was no sign anywhere of the Morris car.
‘You don’t want a wash, Ida,’ Hale implored her. ‘You’re fine.’
‘I’ve got to get a wash,’ she said, ‘I’m sweating all over. You just wait here. I’ll only be two minutes.’
‘You won’t get a good wash here,’ Hale said. ‘Come to a hotel and have a drink—’
‘I can’t wait, Fred. Really I can’t. Be a sport.’
Hale said, ‘That ten shillings. You’d better have that too while I remember it.’
‘It’s real good of you, Fred. Can you spare it?’
‘Be quick, Ida,’ Hale said. ‘I’ll be here. Just here. By this turnstile. You won’t be long, will you? I’ll be here,’ he repeated, putting his hand on a rail of the turnstile.
‘Why,’ Ida said, ‘anyone’d think you were in love,’ and she carried the image of him quite tenderly in her mind down the steps of the ladies’ lavatory: the small rather battered man with the nails bitten close (she missed nothing) and the inkstains and the hand clutching the rail. He’s a good geezer, she said to herself, I liked the way he looked even in that bar if I did laugh at him, and she began to sing again, softly this time, in her warm winey voice, ‘One night—in an alley—Lord Rothschild said to me. . . ’ It was a long time since she’d hurried herself so for a man, and it wasn’t more than four minutes before, cool and powdered and serene, she mounted into the bright Whitsun afternoon to find him gone. He wasn’t by the turnstile, he wasn’t in the crowd by the pedlar; she forced herself into that to make sure and found herself facing the flushed, permanently irritated salesman. ‘What? Not give a shilling for a watch, and a free gift worth exactly twenty times the watch. I’m not saying the watch is worth much more than a shilling, though it’s worth that for the looks alone, but with it a free gift twenty times—’ She held out the ten-shilling note and got her small package and the change, thinking: he’s probably gone to the gents, he’ll be back; and taking up her place by the turnstile, she opened the little envelope which wrapped the watch round.
‘Black
Boy,’ she read, ‘in the four o’clock at Brighton,’ and thought tenderly and proudly, ‘That was his tip. He’s a fellow who knows things,’ and prepared patiently and happily to wait for him to return. She was a sticker. A clock away in the town struck half-past one.
2
The Boy paid his threepence and went through the turnstile. He moved rigidly past the rows of deck-chairs four deep where people were waiting for the orchestra to play. From behind he looked younger than he was in his dark thin ready-made suit a little too big for him at the hips, but when you met him face to face he looked older, the slatey eyes were touched with the annihilating eternity from which he had come and to which he went. The orchestra began to play: he felt the music as a movement in his belly: the violins wailed in his guts. He looked neither right nor left but went on.